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You know that someone who always gets on your nerves? Their personality just doesn’t mesh well with yours and you both know it. Perhaps you should consider purchasing some magic mushrooms and preparing that person a dish containing them. A study out of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions indicates that just a single dose of some strong magic mushrooms could change a person’s personality forever.

It’s All About That Psilocybin

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The prescription for a bad personality is psilocybin, it seems. Psilocybin is the hallucinogen in magic mushrooms and it’s what’s contributing to long term personality changes in people who ingest a high dose of it. 51 participants were a part of the study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins and almost 60% of them experienced a change in personality that they lived with for at least a year.

How The Personality Changes

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After taking some strong magic mushrooms, don’t expect that you’re going to be a math genius or astute businessman the next day, however. A particular section of a person’s personality referred to as openness, which tends to shrink as a person ages, was what changed. Openness is what influences the imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas, and general broad-mindedness. So, instead of solving complex equations, prepare to embark on one hell of a creative journey.

The scientists conducting the study used a reliable personality inventory to track changes in the participants. Using this inventory, and the fact that a person’s personality does not greatly change over the age of 30, the researchers were able to determine whether the magic mushrooms played a part in the observed personality changes or not. They found that the changes they observed were greater than those that occur in a typical person throughout decades of life experiences.

The Study

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Being a participant in a study that involved you ingesting magic mushrooms over a period of time would no doubt be a great story for those usually boring cocktail parties. The participants took the drugs for eight hours during anywhere from two to five sessions. It’s not like these were all done right in a row, though. There were at least three weeks separating sessions to give the participants some time to recover.

The participants knew that they would receive either a high or moderate dose of psilocybin during their session, but didn’t know which. No matter the dosage, the participants were encouraged to block out all other distractions with headphones and eye covers. The scientists measured the participant’s personalities at the session, one to two months after the session, and 14 months after the final session.

If you want to get more in touch with the openness portion of your personality, the researchers do not suggest that you conduct this study on your own. Some of the participants reported having strong feeling of fear and anxiety while on the magic mushrooms. In unsupervised situations, these same feelings could lead to dangerous behavior.

Would you ever consider taking magic mushrooms?

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